Right to water, right to light: State autonomy, accountability, and utility privatization in Central America, 1980--2002

This dissertation focuses on the institutionalization of public goods, viewed through the lens of neo-liberalization in the water and electricity sectors of El Salvador and Costa Rica. Despite the different political and institutional histories of my two countries of focus, both have built state institutions to address public goods, environmental protection, and holistic planning. But the institutionalization of market-led reform (privatization, deregulation, and marketization) has created institutional barriers to state-led development, weakened the state's capacity and autonomy to employ alternatives to the neo-liberal model, and undermined accountability mechanisms designed to make states respond to social and economic rights. This has undermined a rather well-functioning model of public goods provision in Costa Rica, and precluded the development of alternatives to the elite-dominated model in El Salvador. The suppression of state- or community-led alternatives for the provision of public goods is thus driven by neo-liberalism, not simply by state failure. This reality is at the root of tensions between democratization and liberalization.; The theoretical analysis of institutions, state capacity and autonomy, and "embedding" under neo-liberal and accountability models is empirically grounded in a comparative-historical investigation of primary and secondary sources, and buttressed by 60 semi-structured "key informant" interviews with officials from state agencies, business and labor groups, and civil society organizations, carried out over nine months of fieldwork in Central America. This work seeks to contribute to the development of a framework for categorizing different "public goods regimes" that can help explain both why people do not have adequate water and electricity provision, and what is to be done. The answer provided by neo-liberalism is that state failure is the root cause, and that markets, as well as certain types of market-oriented institution-building are the solution. The answer present herein is that both states and markets fail, but that state capacity-building, autonomy from restrictions on state action, and accountability to citizens is a preferred solution to marketization and privatization.